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The draft of the agreement between the Greeks and the Eurogroup is out and, as everyone has noticed, it is not just an act of revenge, it is a piece of legislative torture. It contains old demands, like pension reductions and higher taxes to fund primary surpluses, as well as new demands, like reduction in the power of unions and a massive privatization of state assets using a separate fund controlled by Greece but monitored by the EU’s institutions. In fact the document asks for a massive legislative program touching on every aspect of Greek economic life – tax policy, product regulation, labor markets, state-owned assets, financial sector, shipping, budget surpluses, pensions, and so on. This legislation is demanded within the next few weeks. Such a package is the kind of thing one sees during or just after wartime, not as the product of democratically negotiated decisions. Let’s remember that the programme on which Tsipras and the Eurogroup agreed is something asked of a country that has already experienced a very severe depression, already implemented a number of constraints requested by creditors, has 25% unemployment and a banking crisis. What is the point of torturing a victim whose will is already broken? To destroy all opposition.

I think this should not be read as a proposal for restoring growth to Greece or even as the reflection of an economic blindness in Europe but as the reflux of the EU political project, of which the euro is the purest expression: the preference for technocratic domination over popular sovereignty. This program describes an architecture of rule, one that expresses utter indifference to the attempt by peoples to manage their affairs democratically, and one that demands enormous reserves of discretionary power for the Eurogroup. Note not just the scope of the Eurogroup’s demands but the molecular level of detail with which they lay out demands. For instance, as part of their package of “ambitious product market reforms,” they insist on changes in “Sunday trade, sales periods, pharmacy ownership, milk and bakeries, except over-the-counter pharmaceutical products, which will be implemented in a next step, as well as for the opening of macro-critical closed professions (e.g. ferry transportation).” Then there are the new demands, like “rigorous reviews and modernization of collective bargaining [and] industrial action,” which is Eurospeak for rubbing out labor rights. Other demands make it clear that these decisions are not only extensive and fine-grained, but designed as much as possible to remove responsibility and control from the Greek people and their government. The “scaled up privatisation programme” is to “be established in Greece and be managed by the Greek authorities under the supervision of the relevant European Institutions.” And the “quasi-automatic spending cuts in case of deviations from ambitious primary surplus targets” are “subject to prior approval of the [European] Institutions.”

Most telling of all, “The government needs to consult and agree with the Institutions on all draft legislation in relevant areas with adequate time before submitting it for public consultation or to Parliament.” That is to say, on every above named area of reform – from tax policy to labor markets – the government must consult first with its European managers. The piece-de-resistance, however, is that the Greeks are maximally accountable to the Eurogroup while the Eurogroup is minimally accountable and maximally arbitrary. Having listed its demands the document then says, “The above-listed commitments are minimum requirements to start the negotiations with the Greek authorities.” Later, the document says that an ESM programme is possible “Provided that all the necessary conditions contained in this document are fulfilled.” There is no guarantee the money is forthcoming. In other words, the Eurogroup retains maximum discretion to decide that Greece has failed to meet any of the impossible demands made upon it, while the Greeks possess no similar ability to hold the Europeans to account for their failures. Recall, for instance, that the agreement requires Greece to run budget surpluses that the Germans and French have never managed to achieve and that the ECB recently refused to extend sufficient emergency financing to the Greek banks, essentially engineering a near bank-failure in direct violation of its mandate to provide emergency liquidity to illiquid banks.

There are those who think that you can be pro-Euro and anti-austerity. As this round of negotiations show, the economics and politics of the euro are not separated like that. The Euro is a political project. It is unification without sovereignty. It is the delegation of national sovereignty to groups of finance ministers and supranational bodies whose main task is to suppress the re-appearance of the very source of their power. The political institutions and practices that have grown up around the euro and the EU are based on the belief that exercises of sovereignty are dangerous, irresponsible, and unaccountable. Although these institutions are in one sense nothing more than the product of agreements between nations, their raison d’etre is to prevent any further, outright expression of that sovereign power. That is why they insist on total subjection to their decisions, and why Greece became about more than Greece. The Greeks dared to assert popular sovereignty at the only level it is currently possible to do so. The bitter irony being that the discretion demanded by these post-sovereign entities is less accountable than when exercised as the outright power of a democratically elected government. And no less vindictive.

Of all the new terms that have been invented since the beginning of the crisis in 2008, quantitative easing is perhaps the most bizarre. A purely technical term, it has entered into everyday language as ‘QE’. Monetary policy has taken centre stage as the main tool governments have to do something about growth and QE is it.

Tucked away in the small money supplement of the FT weekend was a long piece on QE. Its discussion of the effects of quantitative easing is worth commenting on. QE is basically a monetary stimulus programme, where central banks create money and use it to buy assets from banks and other financial institutions. The main thing central banks have bought are government bonds. Holders of bonds have therefore exchanged them for cash and that cash is what the governments hope will be spent in ways that stimulate the economy. QE was dreamed up at a time when interests were so low that they couldn’t really go any lower, making a traditional monetary policy response to an economic downturn impossible. The standard approach had been to cut interest rates in a downturn, raise them when the economy seemed to be overheating. Unable to do that with rates so low, QE was the radical alternative.

QE has been striking by its ubiquity: it has been the key policy response of the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan. What is surprising is how prevalently it has been used but how sceptical people are of its effects. The idea is that cash injected into the economy would generate new economic activity. There is little evidence, however, that QE has done that. Banks have tended to use the money to boost their capital ratios rather than to increase lending to businesses. Companies have sat on increasing piles of cash. QE in general is seen as having had little effect on the real economy.

Where has its impact been felt? After all, the US Federal Reserve has been buying $85bn a month of US government bonds since it started its QE. Intervention on such a huge scale cannot be free of effects. According to the FT, the main impact of QE has been on asset prices rather than on the real economy as such. These prices have risen considerably, boosting the wealth of those who own such assets. Predictably enough, that means the already very wealthy. The FT cites a Bank of England study that finds that in the UK, the top 5% of households hold 40% of the assets whose price has risen most because of QE. The central banks’ policy of printing money has inflated some asset prices, to the great benefit of those that hold them.

For everyone else, the effect has been more mixed. By keeping interest rates at very low levels, QE has obviously favoured the lenders over the savers. All those hoping to earn some return on their savings have been disappointed. Home owners, especially those with big mortgages, have been happy. This view of QE helps us understand some of the curious features of this current economic downturn: as the real economy data continues to give cause for real concern (unemployment remains high, growth is anaemic, business investment remains very low), the price of fine art, the best wines and the high end properties in London, Paris and New York have all soared. With low interest rates and with central banks injecting so much liquidity into the bond markets, investors are looking for some return wherever they can. And that includes in a Monet or a large house in Neuilly or Richmond.

The best defence of QE cited by the FT was that things could have been worse without it. It returned confidence to markets and investors, and so helped us avoid the complete collapse that could have occurred in 2008 or 2009. As the FT admits, this argument is difficult to prove: “we just don’t know what would have happened without QE”. It is surprising that a policy with such obvious distributional effects has not been the subject of greater debate or disagreement. This is perhaps because the term itself is so euphemistically technical. Or because it has been carried out by central banks whose place is somewhat outside the terrain of partisan politics. It may also be that governments have been good at convincing people that there is no alternative to QE, which is tantamount to saying that they have no way of tackling problems in the real economy directly but can only work through asset prices.

This, of course, is not true. Governments could intervene far more directly in the economy. However, QE sits alongside the view that governments are fiscally constrained and need to reduce their outgoings as much as possible. Fiscal austerity combined with QE gives us the policy mix for the current period: a massive boost in the prices of assets owned by the wealthiest section of society and extensive cuts in government spending on public services. However technical it may sound, there is nothing ideologically neutral about QE and its effect.

The FT is running this week a series of articles (here but behind a firewall) on European manufacturing and how it is surviving the crisis. In an article on French industry, it suggests that focusing on the grim facts of deindustrialisation and declining competiveness in the North-East of the country risks missing much of what makes French industry successful. It argues that in some sectors France is following the German recipe of success: focus on cutting edge industries, invest heavily in research and development, and make the best use of a highly skilled (though albeit expensive) labour force in order to produce high-quality manufacturing products. The example it gives is of passenger jet engine-maker, Safran, and its more specialised companies like Turbomeca that make helicopter engines.

The article has some arresting facts and figures. Turbomeca is recruiting 200 new engineers this year, a reflection of its status as the world’s largest helicopter engine maker by volume. Safran, its parent company, is recruiting up to 7,000 new engineers, half of which will be employed in France. Its strategy has been to focus on R&D: 12% of its sales revenue was reinvested last year into research. On the Hollande government’s 20 billion Euros tax credit aimed at boosting competitiveness, the article cites the Peugot-Citroen CEO as saying that it will only bring down the company’s 4 billion Euros labour cost bill by 2.5%.

The article itself suggests high labour costs can be offset by investment strategies that focus on innovation and research. But the figures it gives all go to show that what matters is the ability to bring down the wages bill: either via internal adjustment or through outsourcing. Internal adjustment is what Southern European countries have been experiencing, with a positive impact on some export sectors. In France, Safran’s success comes from outsourcing 70% of its engine components. Much of the lower end manufacturing is done in countries with lower wages, a move that also matches German businesses. Another arresting fact: according to McKinsey, in 2009 the average hourly cost of a French factory worker was 32 Euros and in Germany it was 29 Euros. But taking into account the contribution of component suppliers from Eastern Europe, where wages are lower, the real cost of German labour was 25 Euros an hour. In discussions of Germany’s current competitiveness, much is made of Schroder’s labour market reforms and the discipline shown by the country’s labour force. Less attention is given to the role played by this out-sourcing strategy. The FT article concludes with the suggestion that North Africa should become France’s low wage periphery in the way that Eastern Europe has become Germany’s, something Renault has already done by relocating some of its car production to Morocco.

There has been much debate about how France can regain some of its competitiveness. Some suggest a strategic reorientation away from traditional manufacturing towards more hi-tech activities. What seems obvious is that lowering wages is still the strategy overwhelmingly favoured by businesses. Given how unlikely it is that this occurs via internal adjustment in France, the most probable outcome is that French companies continue to exploit outsourcing opportunities.

By Philip Mader, Governance Across Borders editor and postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany

Democratic capitalist societies have been “buying time” with money for the past four decades – first via inflation, then public debt, then privatised Keynesianism – but are running out of resources for postponing the inevitable crisis. As a result, we now find ourselves at a crossroads where capitalism and democracy part ways. That in a nutshell is the thesis of Wolfgang Streeck’s new book, currently only available in German, but being translated for publication with Verso.

The book is based on a series of three “Adorno Lectures” given by the director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in the summer of 2012 at the renowned Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt (other lecturers in recent years included Judith Butler and Luc Boltanski). Its radical language and conclusions may be surprising for those who remember Streeck’s days as advisor to the “Bündnis für Arbeit” initiated by Germany’s former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, which precipitated far-reaching labour market and social security reforms, or of Streeck’s demands for institutional reforms to forge a more competitive and flexible low-wage service sector in Germany modelled on the USA (Der Spiegel, 1999). But crises bring new beginnings, and Streeck’s defense of democracy against its subjugation to the market is auspicious. His analysis of the economic, political and ideological straightjacket that states have found themselves in, not just since the crisis but certainly more pronouncedly in its wake, ties together a revamped analysis of capitalism with a compelling critique of the “frivolous” politics of European integration. With some wit, a characteristic taste for good anecdotes, and above all great clarity, Streeck studies the processes of the moyenne durée which produced the “consolidation state” as the supreme fulfilment of a Hayekian liberal market vision, and which brought us to the impasse of the current period.

The book begins with a critical appraisal of how useful the Frankfurt School’s crisis theories from the 1960s and 1970s still are for explaining today’s crises. While their works are by no means invalidated, Streeck contends that yesteryear’s crisis theorists could scarcely imagine how long capitalist societies would be able to “buy time with money” and thereby continually escape the contradictions and tensions diagnosed by their theories of late capitalism. He explains the developments in Western capitalism since the 1970s as “a revolt by capital against the mixed economy of the postwar era”; the disembedding of the economy being a prolonged act of

successful resistance by the owners and managers of capital – the “profit-dependent” class – against the conditions which capitalism had had to accept after 1945 in order to remain politically acceptable in a rivalry of economic systems. (p. 26)*

By the 1970s, Streeck argues, capitalism had encountered severe problems of legitimacy, but less among the masses (as Adorno and Horkheimer had expected) than among the capitalist class. Referring to Kalecki, he suggests that theories of crises have to refocus on the side of capital, understanding modern economic crises as capital “going on strike” by denying society its powers of investment and growth-generation. The 1970s crisis, and the pathways that led out of it, thus were the result of capital’s unwillingness to become a mere beast of burden for the production process – which many Frankfurt theorists had tacitly assumed would happen. Capital’s reaction to its impending domestication set in motion a process of “de-democratising capitalism by de-economising democracy” (Entdemokratisierung des Kapitalismus vermittelsEntökonomisierung der Demokratie). This ultimately brought about the specific and novel form of today’s crisis and its pseudo-remedies.

The rest, as they say, is history. In the second part, Steeck outlines how public debt rose with the neoliberal revolution, something mainstream economics and public choice quickly and falsely explained away as an instance of the “tragedy of the commons” with voters demanding too much from the state. However, the rise in debt came in fact with a curtailment of the power of democracy over the state and the economy. First, the good old “tax state” was ideologically restrained – starving the beast – and gradually found itself rendered a meek “debtor state” increasingly impervious to any remaining calls for redistribution by virtue of its objective impotence. Then, the resulting power shift to what Streeck calls the state’s “second constituency” – the creditor class, which asserts control over its stake in public debt and demands “bondholder value” – generated a standoff which Streeck observes between the conflicting demands of Staatsvolk und Marktvolk. The fact that the debtor state owes its subsistence less to contributions from the taxpaying “state people” and more to the trust of its creditor “market people” leads to a situation in which debtor states must continually credibly signal their prioritisation of creditors’ demands, even if it harms growth and welfare. Creditors, in their conflict with citizens, aim to secure fulfilment of their claims in the face of (potential) crises. The ultimate power balance remains unclear, but the “market people’s” trump card is that they can mobilise other states to fulfil their demands, leading to a kind of international financial diplomacy in their interest.

The archetype of such a transnational financial diplomacy, Streeck contends in the third and final part, is Europe under the Euro, where we encounter an even more wretched type: the “consolidation state”. Consolidation, Streeck argues, is a process of state re-structuring to better match the expectations of financial markets, and the consolidation state is a sort of perverse antithesis to the Keynesian state, acting in vain appeasement of the financial markets in hope of one day again being permitted to grow its economy. Its story begins with Friedrich Hayek, whose 1939 essay The Economic Conditions of Interstate Federalism Streeck presents as a strikingly accurate blueprint for the modern European Union, complete with references to the common market as assuring interstate peace. The European “liberalisation machine” slowly and successively reduced national-level capacity for discretionary intervention in markets; but it was European Monetary Union which ultimately rendered one of the last powerful (yet blunt) instruments available to states impracticable: currency devaluation. The resulting multi-level regime, a regime built on an unshakable belief in European “Durchregierbarkeit” (roughly: the capacity to govern Europe) and driven by a bureaucratic centre (or centres) increasingly well-insulated from democratic meddling, completes the actual European consolidation state of the early 21st century. Within this kind of hollowed-out supra-state individual countries have to fulfil their duties to pay before fulfilling any duties to protect, and recent “growth pacts” like Hollande’s are mere political showmanship. In the present framework even more substantial programmes would be likely to fail, Streeck argues with reference to Germany’s and Italy’s huge and hugely unsuccessful regional growth programmes. Stemming the decline of the southern Europe with transfer payments while adhering to monetary union with Germany is as much an impossibility as it is fuel for future discord.

Now, with tighter financial means, the cohesion of the Brussels bloc of states depends on hopes invested in neoliberal ‘structural adjustment’ with a parallel neutralisation of national democracies by supranational institutions and a targeted cultivation of local support through ‘modern’ middle classes and state apparatuses, who see their future in western European ways of business and life. Additional packages for structural reform, stimulus and growth from the centre are mainly of symbolic value, serving as discussion fodder for the greater public and for the mise-en-scène of summit decisions, as well as for politically and rhetorically absorbing whatever is left over of social democracy. Finally, puny as these may be financially, they can also be used to distribute loyalty premiums and patronage to local supporters: instruments of elite co-optation by doling out advantages in the Hayekisation process of European capitalism and its state system. (p. 203)

What can be done? It would be wrong to describe Streeck’s conclusions as optimistic. The capacity of populations or politicians to resist the imperatives of the consolidation state appears small, even where he argues that popular opposition is key, pointing to some rays of light in recent social movements. Streeck characterises present capitalist society as a “deeply divided and disorganised society, weakened by state repression and numbed by the products of a culture industry which Adorno could hardly have imagined even in his most pessimistic moments” (p. 217). It is furthermore politically held in check by a transnational plutocracy which has far greater sway over parliaments and parties than citizens. Given the likely failure of the consolidation state at restoring normality, we have thus arrived at a crossroads where capitalism and democracy must go their separate ways.

The likeliest outcome, as of today, would be the completion of the Hayekian social model with the dictatorship of a capitalist market economy protected against democratic correctives. Its legitimacy would depend on those who were once its Staatsvolk learning to accept market justice and social justice as one and the same thing, and understand themselves as part of one unified Marktvolk. Its stability would additionally require effective instruments to ensure that others, who do not want to accept this, can be ideologically marginalised, politically dis-organised and physically kept in check. […] The alternative to a capitalism without democracy would be democracy without capitalism, at least without capitalism as we know it. This would be the other utopia, contending with Hayek’s. But in contrast, this one wouldn’t be following the present historical trend, and rather would require its reversal. (p. 236)

Small acts of resistance, Streeck notes, can throw a spanner in the works, and the system is more vulnerable than it may appear; the Draghis and Bernankes still fear nothing more than social unrest. For Streeck, projects for democratising Europe, calls for which have recently gained momentum, can hardly work in a Europe of diverging interests. They would have to be implemented top-down, and furthermore have to succeed both amidst a deep (public) legitimacy crisis of Europe and against an already firmly embedded neoliberal programme with a decades-long head-start.

Streeck places his highest hopes in restoring options for currency devaluation via a kind of European Bretton Woods framework; “a blunt instrument – rough justice –, but from the perspective of social justice better than nothing” (p. 247). Indeed, a newly flexible currency regime would re-open some alternatives to so-called “internal devaluation” – nothing but a euphemism for already-euphemistic “structural adjustment” – and thereby permit a more heterogeneous political economy within Europe which could better match cultural differences (the book’s references to which sometimes seem to teeter on the edge of calls for national liberation). The Euro as a “frivolous experiment” needs to be undone, Streeck claims. But would that really mean a return to social justice? States like Great Britain or Switzerland hardly suggest a linkage, least of all an automatic one. Furthermore, declines in real wages from currency devaluation can mirror those of internal devaluation, merely with the difference of how politically expensive the process is (and it would still likely be central bankers, not democratic institutions, taking the decision). A return to national currencies looks like an all too easy way out, falling short of political-economic transformations for restoring some semblance of social justice to capitalism – let alone social justice as an alternative to capitalism.

Nonetheless, Streeck’s is a forceful argument in favour of preserving what vestiges remain of national sovereignty in face of capitalism’s attacks on democracy, as tools for gradually pushing back the transnational regime of market sovereignty. He concludes that the greatest threat to Western Europe today is not nationalism, but “Hayekian market liberalism” – whether the one could be the dialectical product of the other remains another question. Above all his analysis of capital as a collective player capable of acting with guile (Williamson) to ensure capitalism remains in its better interests – intellectual traces of Streeck’s days as a scholar of collective bargaining, perhaps – is clearly one of the most innovative approaches to understanding the class dimension of the political economy of the present crisis. His anatomy of the type of regime we increasingly have to deal with, the consolidation state moulded to address capital’s own legitimacy crisis yet sacrificing democratic legitimacy in the process, perhaps offers the most cogent picture of the present multi-level political economy of debt in Europe (and beyond). Taking back the consolidation state and re-appropriating democracy from capitalism’s clutches at the crossroads, of course, is a task beyond the reach of any book.

(*All quotations are the reviewer’s own translations from the German original.)

With all the talk of competitive currency devaluations and international currency wars, less attention is being paid on the arresting fact that some countries within the Eurozone are achieving what many thought they could not: an internal devaluation via wages and other production costs.

A consequence of this is that some Southern European economies are regaining shares in export markets, their products cheapened by a mixture of labour market reforms and downwards pressure on wages. The FT recently reported that in Portugal exports in 2012 rose by 5.8%, with exports to outside the EU rising 20% in this period. This was Portugal’s third consecutive year of plus 5% export growth. Writing about Spain, Tony Barber suggested that a similar phenomenon was occurring in the Spanish manufacturing sector. Car companies planning to reduce production in France and Belgium are boosting output in Spain. Nissan has committed 130 million Euros of extra investment into its Barcelona plant in order to raise annual production to 80,000 units. Ford, Renault and Volkswagen have all followed suit with their own investments. Barber explains that lying behind such decisions are changes in Spanish labour laws. A reform package last year introduced by the government has loosened up collective bargaining practices, making it easier for firms to negotiate favourable terms with workers.

The ability to boost export competitiveness by internally devaluing is not uniform across the Eurozone. France has enacted its own labour market reforms but labour costs remain significantly higher there than in Spain or Portugal. Monti in Italy has been less successful in pushing through labour market reforms. This unevenness has had the effect of exaggerating the competition between countries within the Eurozone. Unable to compete with one another via national currency manipulations, competition is realized via changes in the labour market. Accepting lower wages has become a matter of national duty in today’s Eurozone.

This development has various implications. The first is that it seems parts of the Eurozone are able to achieve what we thought was only possible in the olden days of the Gold Standard: internal adjustment where the burden falls upon societies, not currencies. This worked back then because there were far fewer public expectations about jobs and welfare to challenge the harsh assumptions of Gold Standard supporters. When such internal adjustment became intolerable, it collapsed. We might have expected something similar today. In fact, the quiescence of European labour has made internal adjustment possible. In some places, it has meant hollowing out national democracy in favour of more stable, technocratic alternatives, but the single currency remains. Differences between the constraints imposed by Eurozone membership and those of the Gold Standard help explain some of the stability of the former but not all. Much is also due to weak labour militancy.

Another implication dovetails with a previous post on falling productivity in the UK. In some Eurozone member states, productivity figures have improved. In Spain, productivity is has risen by 12% since mid-2008. However, such increases have not been achieved via any labour-saving investments. There have been no marked technological developments that explain rising productivity figures. Rather, gains have been made through labour itself. This tells us a great deal about European capitalism: it is far easier to claw back price competitiveness via assaults on labour than it is to boost productivity through capital investment in research, product development and technological improvement. Paradoxically, we can say that weak labour militancy results in low incentives for firms to channel capital into labour saving technology.

The kind of internal adjustment taking place within the Eurozone is thus hardly a victory for supporters of austerity. Competiveness is boosted in short-term ways, via downward pressure on wages. There is no longer term gain in productivity that might actually leave a socially useful legacy for societies as a whole. Recessions and social upheavals in the past had the same human cost in terms of wasted lives but they came with great labour-saving inventions and other gains. European leaders are so worried about currency wars precisely because Yen and Dollar devaluations threaten to wipe away the marginal gains in price competitiveness their businesses have made. And they know that were this to occur, there would be nothing much left. Only the waste.

Like this:

As long-time observer of French politics Art Goldhammer has pointed out, there is little in the French government’s battle with the Indian steel magnate, Lakshmi Mittal, that makes sense. Uncertainty prevails over what deal the government has done with Mittal, what promises he may or may not have given, and what the future is for the Florange plant that is at the centre of the whole affair.

One thing that seems to be clear: there will be no forced nationalization of the plant, as argued for by France’s industry minister, Arnaud Montebourg. Well-known as a voice on the left of an otherwise rather centrist Socialist government, Montebourg has long championed the cause of “de-globalization”: a return to national protection and a more traditional national industrial policy of old. Montebourg plunged into the Mittal affair by criticizing publicly the Indian businessman, accusing him of not keeping his promises. His proposed solution – that gave much hope to the workers of the steel plant threatened with closure – was to force a nationalization of the plant. Mittal resisted, saying he was willing to let the government take over some of the plant but he wanted to retain those elements he thought could be profitable. At issue are two blast furnaces at Florange which Mittal argues are no longer worth keeping given the overcapacity of steel production in Europe. As demand for steel has fallen, so Mittal has been forced to rationalize production. Existing demand can be met by steel production in other sites, such as Dunkirk (read economist Elie Cohen on this here), leaving the Florange furnances without customers. As the government wasn’t ready to cough up the cash needed for a full nationalization, and many in the government were opposed to doing so, it made a deal with Mittal. Though Mittal committed himself to 180 million Euros of investment in cold steel processing at Florange, the issue of the blast furnaces remains unsolved. The government is claiming that it has saved the 629 jobs that were threatened but the unions don’t think Mittal will keep his word.

What is really at stake in this affair? In many ways, it seems distinctly French and confirms much of what The Economist wrote about France a few weeks ago in its special report on the country. Loud union reps camping out at the entrance to the site, vitriolic anti-capitalist rhetoric from leftwing ministers, behind-the-scene deals brokered between political and business interests: all evidence of the poor state of corporate France.

Beyond some of these clichés, two issues stand out. One is to do with Montebourg. His appointment as minister responsible for revitalizing French industry was surprising. As someone who harbours ambitions far grander than saving a few hundred jobs on the Franco-Luxembourg border, Montebourg could have been expected to resist the poisoned portfolio. It was obviously going to mean fighting a losing battle over unproductive sites like Florange and yet he accepted the job. What has been tested in the Florange affair is Montebourg’s representativeness. Does he stand for a strong current in French opinion and within the Socialist Party about a state-led route for industrial rejuvenation? Is it correct to see France as torn between its Colbertian instincts of old and a new recognition of the need for liberalisation and market-driven competitiveness? This is the kind of ideological battle The Economist likes but events over the last few days suggest something rather less dramatic is going on in France. Montebourg doesn’t seem to have his own industrial strategy but nor does the government. At the very least, strategies are about choices and priorities. What the government’s response over Florange has demonstrated is immobility and fright: unwilling to give up on the Florange workers and yet unable to place their intervention in this case within a wider plan for French industry. Montebourg appears as the fire-fighter in chief more than as a voice for an alternative French industrial strategy.

The second issue is about nationalization itself. Elie Cohen argues that the Florange affair is different from other recent instances of nationalization: General Motors in the US, Alstom in France. He is right to point to differences: there is little in common between Florange and the company-wide restructuring that resulted from the government takeover of General Motors. But he doesn’t mention the other obvious case of nationalization, that of banking and financial institutions. Via bail-outs, some of these have become the property of tax-payers. In all cases, this was evidence of massive strategic intervention by public actors to save a financial system they believed was on the rocks. Why is it that such interventions are free from the sense of helplessness and pointlessness that government involvement in failing manufacturing industries evokes for all observers?

Former Danish Prime Minister, Poul Rasmussen, an articulate European social democrat, once made the observation that many Western politicians appear unwilling to accept a shrinking of their country’s financial sector but they are willing to run down almost entirely their manufacturing sectors. He put this down to a deference elected representatives felt in the face of suave and sophisticated bankers. He perhaps exaggerated the point but it is certainly true that whilst government intervention to save failing industries appears to us anachronistic, intervention to prop up a tottering financial sector is seen as far-sighted and brave. This is surely as much about sentiment as it is an objective assessment. After all, a reason why the government couldn’t afford to nationalize Florange is that it still hasn’t paid off the debts incurred in saving its banks. These are the kinds of priorities the French government cannot articulate but they are nevertheless there in the background and structure government action over the mid to long term. There is no strategy there, but an underlying structure of interests and relations of power upon which French society rests.

Like this:

Much has been said and written about the Gallois report on competitiveness, made public earlier this week. The 31st report on competiviness produced in the last 10 years, this one had been commissioned by the French prime minister. Louis Gallois, a prominent figure in French industrial life, is seen as able to bridge the divide between French business and the French state. Relations have soured recently between the two, in particular between small and medium sized businesses and the recently elected Socialist government. Gallois’ own career has involved heading large companies that are competitive internationally but are also very closed tied to the French state. He is an emblematic figure of French state capitalism.

The report itself rightly highlighted what is a pressing problem for France: a looming deindustrialisation. France is in the difficult position of straddling an increasingly empty middle ground. On the one side, there are the high-quality goods produced by an export power like Germany, goods that remain expensive but whose quality guarantees that they dominate the high-end markets for cars and many other industrial products. On the other side are lower quality goods from Asia that win-out on price. They are cheap and good enough to crowd out slightly better quality but signficantly more expensive French-made products. Stuck in between this polarisation, France has in the last 10 years lost a great deal of export market shares. Hundreds of billions of Euros of exports have been lost and around 750,000 manufacturing jobs have gone in the last decade. This was not always so: until the early 2000s France enjoyed a strong showing on the balance of payments, not least relative to Germany. But it has now gone deeply into deficit, as the graph below shows. France has not seen the kind of reversal of fortunes that Spain, Greece or Portugal have but its current acccount deficit has been steadily growing.

The report itself recommended that the burden of social security payments should be shifted – to the tune of a 30 billion Euro transfer – away from business and salary contributions and towards generalized taxation, in the form of the CSG tax (generalized social contribution) and VAT. French economist Jean-Claude Casanova put it thus: when employees decide to have babies, companies face a rise in labour costs that in some cases can push them into the red. Bizarrely, as soon as the main recommendation of the Gallois became known – what the author referred to as a “confidence shock” for French business – the government declared that it would not be implementing this particular recommendation. It preferred a different system for lowing labour costs that involved a complex credit transfer system. Companies will have to work out for themselves what they can win back from the state through these transfers, something that favours large companies with bulging accounting departments. Smaller firms, the ones suffering most from declining competiveness, will find the system opaque and difficult to implement. Regardless of where you stand on the rights and wrongs of the labour cost/competitiveness debate in France, the government’s handling of the report was poor.

It would be wrong, though, to dismiss all this with a gallic shrug and a muttering of plus ça change. The business newspaper, Les Echos, points to one recommendation in the report likely to be taken on by the government and one which could have a very considerable impact on France in the medium to long term. Gallois proposed that French firms systematically include in their governing bodies worker representatives. In companies with more than 5,000 employees, between a quarter and a third of the members of these governing bodies should be worker representatives. Les Echos celebrates this as a signal that France will move in the direction taken up by Germany, Austria and other countries with much more successful industrial policies than France. In the German case, this rule is applied to companies with more than 500 employees. For companies with over 2,000 employees, the proportion of worker representatives in these governing bodies rises to 50%. Les Echos argues that therein lies the key to Germany’s success in turning itself round and boosting its competitiveness.

What Les Echos is getting at is labour discipline. German companies were able to boost competitiviness in the absence of currency devaluations largely because German workers accepted the cost-cutting measures being proposed, many of which were harsh and involved temporary unemployment. As well as the German government having a strong hold over unions, company directors themselves have a better hold over their own workforce. The consensual way labour and business interests within German firms implemented the competitiveness drive of the mid to late 2000s in Germany goes a long way to explaining Germany’s present export success. France has famously been an example of a very different kind of industrial relations: more conflictual, dominated by the role played by unions, resistant to change. What the Gallois report proposes is a way in which French labour could be better controlled. If implemented, this could have a far greater impact on French industry than the more public spat over VAT, CSG and how to finance social security. At least, that is what Les Echos hopes. Perhaps, in focusing on its rejection of Gallois’ proposal to raise CSG and VAT, the government is deflecting attention from other measures, that could be more far-reaching in the long term. French business-labour relations will not be transformed over night but this could be the beginning of a greater disciplining of labour through co-option into the decision-making process.